You seem to have confused your statement -- "a better place after humans are gone" -- with what the photographer was trying to do:

"...French photographer Thierry Cohen worries about city dwellers not being able to see the starry sky. With light and air pollution plaguing urban areas, it is not as if residents can look up from their streets and roof decks to spot constellations and shooting stars. ... He’d give city dwellers a taste of what they were missing."

You seem to have confused your statement -- "a better place after humans are gone" -- with what the photographer was trying to do:

"...French photographer Thierry Cohen worries about city dwellers not being able to see the starry sky. With light and air pollution plaguing urban areas, it is not as if residents can look up from their streets and roof decks to spot constellations and shooting stars. ... He’d give city dwellers a taste of what they were missing."

Sorry but I entirely missed his intended meaning because I thought he had something more profound in his mind. After all, he didn't.

... I thought he had something more profound in his mind. After all, he didn't.

For some of us, it is quite profound.

If by "more profound" you meant "after humans are gone," it might be so, but original it ain't. There has already been a TV series (on National Geographic Channel, I believe) about it. At least this guy came up with an original idea, plus a very cool and elaborate execution.

When I was a kid my brother and I used to spend summers in northern Michigan at an aunt's cottage. We were at the end of a fairly large lake, and in those days there were very, very few houses or cottages around the lake. Most of the houses that existed were about two miles away at the other end of the lake. There was no electricity at our end of the lake, so we used oil lamps.

I often think of nights when I was out in a boat on that lake, with maybe one dim light visible on the shore. You could lie back in the boat and look up at God's astonishing creation laid out before you without any light contamination. It was breathtaking and humbling. I sometimes wonder whether or not the hubris I see increasing in our society is at least partly caused by our growing inability to have experiences like that with the night sky so that the truth of our insignificance becomes something more than an abstraction.

I sometimes wonder whether or not the hubris I see increasing in our society is at least partly caused by our growing inability to have experiences like that with the night sky so that the truth of our insignificance becomes something more than an abstraction.

How could we actually find out whether hubris is increasing or decreasing in our society?

By living long enough to observe it, Isaac. There's more than one kind of hubris. In the long run, hubris in a society is more dangerous than hubris in a dictator like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Kim. . . Eventually the dictator dies or is overthrown but a hubristic society advances boldly and blindly into catastrophe.